Germany-China freight train to beat ocean freight

DB Schenker’s new train service from Hamburg to Zhengzhou is about 20 days faster than ocean freight.

Claimed to be for the first time ever, DB Schenker, together with the City and Port Authority of Zhengzhou (Province Henan), has started a freight train service from Hamburg to the central Chinese city. The train, with a capacity of 41 containers, transports, among other things, industrial robots for an international technology firm.

The train to Zhengzhou takes around 17 days for the 10,214 km distance through Poland, Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan to China. As such, it is about 20 days faster than ocean freight.

The service is available as a shared-user service, so other forwarders are encouraged to sell space on the train.

As from August 2013, DB Schenker has been logistics partner of the Zhengzhou City Administration for the running of weekly trains to Hamburg. Now, there will be regular train traffic in the opposite direction.

DB Schenker has been running regular weekly block-train services between China and Germany since 2011. Most of DB Schenker’s customers are from the automotive and electronics industries. Between 2012 and 2014, a total of 40,000 TEU have been carried between China and Europe.